Thursday, February 18, 2010

Reforming American Democracy

I think what we need is electoral reform. We need to be able select who represents our interests in the legislature. And taxpayers need to have the final say on how their money is spent and on how much is borrowed.

Our winner-take-all elections give all the power to whichever candidate convinces the most people that he or she is the best candidate to represent their interests.

For most people, the candidate they select rarely shares most of their view, but is just the least worst of the two choices they typically have.

If people could vote for candidates from smaller parties that closely matched their views and these parties could get a proportion of the possible representation, it is far more likely that candidates will be well known to those that vote for them, will speak their minds and will not need or be able to misrepresent their plans once in office.

When a candidate must convince everyone in an area that he is the best candidate, he necessarily must lie a lot or at least misrepresent his views. We are simply going to get a better quality of person running if we change to proportional representation.

And its going to be a lot less expensive and with much less need for money from special interests to run such campaigns. People with a given perspective can tell who truly shares their views. Its just a much easier thing to do than to try to guess which liar will act the way you want the most if elected.

Finally, we must give taxpayers more voice than they currently have over what is spent and borrowed, in proportion to how much tax they have to pay.

It is is simply ridiculous that the village idiot has as much say on spending as Bill Gates. We need to balance the tendency of democracies to always soak the rich and ever expand the masses who don't work for a living.